It's not a question of compromise. It's a question of being right vs
being wrong. If one person says that 2 + 2 = 4 and a loud mob screams
that their prophet revealed to them in a blog post that 2 + 2 = 6, you
don't compromise and say that 2 + 2 = 5.

> There is no point in waiting for a perfect solution to an engineering
> issue if that solution is so far away nobody wants to wait.
>
> The compromises become political discussions and we have seen plenty
> of them already. As its 'the masses' that will implement the
> solution, not the idealists, its time to go with the compromise that
> has been hammered out elsewhere ... unless of course the idealists
> have a patch already.

You appear to be assuming that those pushing the --as-needed solution
have it finished. This is far from the case. There's still a lot of
work that would need to be done, and that work will have to be carried
on by every developer indefinitely as new versions of packages come
out. It's a case of "the wrong thing requires quite a lot more work
before it's ready, and once it's ready everyone will have to carry on
working on it forever".
--
Ciaran McCreesh